IN THE CHURCHYARD.
Blanden devoted himself most zealously to looking after the people who
had suffered from the fire on his farm, and to the necessary new
buildings; he seemed to be inspired with a renewed breath of life; the
impetus to labour and work, which had lain perfectly dormant within him
since those occurrences at the sea-side roused him afresh. Winter
meanwhile had set in, and made the solitude at Kulmitten still more
dreary. Blanden's resolution to form a settled home became more and
more fixed, and the picture of the beautiful singer as the future
goddess of the house pervaded his waking dreams with daily increasing
persistency.
He began, too, to care more about political matters, the progress of
which latterly he had only silently watched. His conviction gained
strength that, despite all obstacles, the Prussian State would obtain a
constitution, and all the provinces be united by one common bond. Then
a political career would be opened to him once again; he should no
longer be dependant upon the judgment of his equals in this district;
he could then stand before the population of the entire province as a
candidate for election.
That the continuance of the provincial assemblies in their present
state could not last much longer was his fixed opinion, but in order to
gain distinct views of the new course which the future should disclose
to him, he must make his name known in more extensive circles; he must
be called the champion of the political movement. A welcome opportunity
for it was offered to him by the assemblies of the citizens in the
provincial capital, which assemblies had been recently formed, and he
did not hesitate to intimate to the committee that he should deliver a
lecture upon the French organisation and the July dynasty.
Meanwhile, in the newspapers he read an announcement of an operatic
performance in which Signora Bollini should again take part; thus he
inferred that she had returned from Riga. He immediately ordered his
four black horses to be harnessed, and hastened to the capital by the
shortest route. He arrived there amid a violent downfall of snow and
terribly boisterous wind. He prepared to visit Giulia at once; his road
led him past a churchyard, through the gateway of which a little
funeral procession was passing. Closely concealed as the faces were in
cloaks and furs, some of them appeared very familiar to him; they were
the companions of those times, the late effects of which had prepared
such bitter pain for him. He recognised them again, greatly as they
were altered; not only was it the snow falling from heaven, it was also
the snow of age that silvered their hair. He believed that he perceived
amongst the followers the Breaker of the Seal, the former minister of
the community, who was now deposed from his office of teacher. Whom did
they bear to the tomb? Curiosity drove him to join the procession. When
it had drawn near to the open grave, Blanden asked the person next to
him who was being buried?
"Frau Hamptmann Salden," was the hoarse reply.
At that moment they began to sing beside the tomb; a violent gust of
wind shook the snow from the cypresses, and whirled it up from every
grave, which had been softly bedded in its lap. The shivering assembly
seemed to be animated but by the one desire that the burial ceremony
might soon be over.
Blanden rested his head upon a lofty tombstone, his tears flowed
unrestrainedly. How deserving of tears every human life seems to be,
when a thoughtful mind sums up its years in as many seconds! How
mournful are his short-lived joys, and how many terrors does the span
of time contain! No funeral oration disturbed his reflections; the
ministers who would gladly have spoken beside this grave, dared not
perform their office, and from the others accusations were feared which
might have disturbed the peacefulness of the tomb.
While the wind buried in its gusts the sounds of the choral singing,
Blanden thought of the youthful, beautiful Pauline; he thought of
lovely Eva! Mother and daughter were blended in one picture; it was a
shadowy portrait in which their features became united. But the one
reposed in the ocean's lap, the other in wintry earth!
Already the clods fell with a hollow sound upon the coffin, thrown in
hastily by half-frozen hands, and, after a hurried performance of the
last verse of the hymn, the assembly rushed away as if carried off by
the bride of the storm, which, howling hoarsely, swept over the lonely
graves.
Blanden had maintained his concealment behind the monument and
cypresses; now he stepped forth; sadly he cast the hard clods of earth
upon the coffin; his soul was _one_ thought of love--_one_ prayer for
forgiveness, because dark self-accusations were stirred in his heart.
Deeply buried in meditation, he did not observe that the wind had
become a hurricane, cracking the boughs of the trees on every side,
casting one weeping-willow to the ground, that the earth groaned, and
hardly permitted him to stand upright. The grave-diggers had already
laid their spades aside, and taken refuge in the dead-house.
Suddenly something struggled before him through the snow; he saw a
fluttering cloak, and a bare-headed girl upon her knees in front of
him; stars of snow nestled in her tangled hair, glassy eyes stared up
at him, and glowing kisses covered his hands.
It was half-witted Kaetchen--he had recognised her at once.
"What brings you here? What do you want here in this tempest?"
"Beautiful Eva's mother is buried; I want what you do!"
"And what do you want of me?"
"Have had a little note for you, for a long, long time--now I can give
it to you. Eva wrote it upon the ocean."
"Mad woman--and now, for the first time, you speak of it to me?"
"To others I would not show it, and to you I could not give it sooner.
I am staying with Mother Hecht, the herbalist; you will find me there
every evening."
And she kissed his hands once more, and the following moment had
disappeared amongst the whirling snow.
The tempest became so violent that Blanden was obliged to take refuge
in the dead-house, where he found several participators in the funeral
who had also fled thither; amongst them a Gerichtsrath whom he knew.
The former had never belonged to the pious community, but, as legal
assistant, had often imparted advice to Frau von Salden, and had also
conducted the case instituted against half-witted Kaetchen. He gave
information to Blanden which possessed great interest for the latter.
Since Eva's death, Pauline had constantly been ailing, and succumbed to
a consumptive disorder.
As to Kaetchen--the prosecution in which Blanden was called as a
witness--although she persisted in the most obstinate silence, no proof
of her guilt could be obtained; she had been handed over to the
supervision of an institution in which mentally disordered and weak
persons were looked after by the State. The medical man had pronounced
her dull, obtuse demeanour not to proceed from any malady of the brain,
but to be partially the consequences of the defective bringing up by
her tyrannical parents, partially to be connected with her physical
development. In fact, after the expiration of a year an unmistakable
alteration had taken place in her; she had commenced to speak more
naturally, indeed, more distinctly and coherently, so that the medical
man could release her from his establishment.
Blanden inquired why Pauline had returned to the town.
He learned that she had been obliged to sell her estate, and also that
she had sought consolation amongst her friends; in the country solitude
she had been verging on despair.
The storm, meanwhile, had somewhat abated; Blanden relinquished his
visit to the singer, and hastened to his house, so as to be able to
indulge in those thoughts and emotions which besieged him after the
occurrence in the churchyard. He was in a mood in which life no longer
seemed worth living; the ruin of youth and beauty filled him with deep
melancholy, and the connection between human destinies, by means of
which a load of guilt suddenly struck an innocent person, occasioned
painful reflections. To him it appeared enviable thus to be buried
beneath the snow, to repose in wintry earth.
But if he would not cast himself amongst the dead, he must extinguish
the candles in the sable-draped mourning chamber of his soul, beside
the sarcophagus of past love, and step forth once more into the day of
life.
On the following afternoon he visited Giulia--he found her alone; her
obsequious friend left the room. The Signora looked pale and sad; the
colouring of her features, which can only be designated by the Italian
word _morbidezza_, looked almost sickly. Her eyes, however, shone
joyously as Blanden entered, but when he would have folded her in his
arms she stepped back in decided refusal.
"The lady of the Lago Maggiore and Signora Bollini are not the same
persons. The former appeared in a dream, which the intoxicated rapture
of the south begets, the latter appears in the sober north, so
well-known that the newspapers speak of her. Here, in this world of
citizens, one dreams no more! That we are acquainted with the same
secret only gives us the right of friendship, and in token of it I
offer you my hand."
She uttered it all deliberately, but yet in a cordial tone.
"Indeed," replied Blanden, whom the Signora had completely won by these
words, "it is folly to wish to bind ourselves to a past that is divided
from us by the flood of time. With time we too have changed, and often
that has become utterly strange to us which formerly had such
irresistible dominion over us. I honour your sentiments, Signora! The
claim upon love must always be conquered anew, at least grant me the
hope that we may succeed."
"I cannot but fear that without the magic of the south, the prize would
not reward the trouble undertaken in earnest. What am I to you here,
where my name can be read at every street corner?"
"The magic of art, Signora, can everywhere produce an _Isola bella_
with its peep into enchanting distance."
"The magic of art! Oh, how rude, everyday life sweeps it away! Attend
an operatic rehearsal, listen to the confused cries of the manager, the
conductor, the bars of music constantly broken off; the musical howls
of the chorus; visit the theatrical wardrobe, and look at the tinsel
out of which the artistic work of our beauty is created for an
evening's performance; listen to the criticising comments of our
colleagues behind the scenes; you will be in doubt where you should
seek the magic of art."
"Still it does exist, and before its power disappears the ponderous
apparatus by which it must be called into life."
"Certainly in the emotions of creative and sensitive minds it bears an
enduring life. But when the magic forsakes us, who should be the
representatives of art? Is there a greater pain than the sensation of
one's own uselessness, and in addition, when it is unmerited, when it
was formerly foreign to us? A singer whose voice becomes weaker, who
from day to day becomes more conscious of its decay, is more fitted for
elegiac reflections than a crumbling ruin, around which ivy climbs."
"You speak, dear friend, of matters which it is to be hoped you do not
know from personal experience?"
"Yet I do know them by experience. I tell it you in confidence; before
the world I must seek to conceal it, my fame may be able to disguise
for some time longer what is unavoidable--a good name has illimitable
credit. But my enemies are already beginning to destroy it. A spiteful
reporter in Riga made exaggerated allusions to the deterioration of my
voice, and a local newspaper here, which bears the impress of Herr
Spiegeler's intellect, hastened to print a copy of that criticism."
Blanden shrugged his shoulders contemptuously.
"You are mistaken if you estimate lightly this intentional undermining
of a well-earned renown. It cannot be accurately shown out of what
atoms an artist's fame gradually rises, nor how they are wafted into a
whole, just as easily can it be blown into pieces! How quickly the
colours glow in a gay, shimmering structure of clouds; fame, too, is
but effulgence, and suddenly dead night comes to relieve its light.
Singers, both men and women, are condemned before all others to outlive
their fame."
"Nor do they receive it freshly in their hands at first."
"Oh, no, it withers for them--in their hands! Read the article which
Spiegeler has to-day had printed upon my 'Somnambula,' such an
article is a blight upon every blossom of renown. They are all tiny
half-concealed pieces of malice, but they hit one's heart. Public
opinion is easily led, to-morrow already I shall stand before hundreds
who no longer believe in me. Ah fame! How paralysing is the sensation
of being given up to the crowd's want of faith."
"All great artists have been exposed to such attacks."
"But not all have overcome them successfully! How many talents and
geniuses have been destroyed by the indifference of the public, whose
enthusiasm was nipped in the bud often by means of personal animosity
on the part of the critic; often by their distorted comprehension! Only
those are numbered in the history of art who bore away the prize, not
the others who with equal courage and equal strength, undertook the
race of life, but succumbed beneath the obstacles which often chance,
but still more often wicked will, cast into their path. But for him who
so labours without pleasure in a career of art, it is greater torture
than all else that men do against their will, for what is art without
enthusiasm, and enthusiasm is only augmented pleasure, which lays hold
of men so that they may pour out upon others some of their own
overflowing abundance."
"Is enthusiasm then dependent upon the approval of the many? Is it not
the artist's voluntary devotion to his ideal?"
"It is dependent upon his happy mood, because to produce the beautiful
is bliss and a favour of destiny. Read this condemnation, must not
every glad emotion be crushed by it? I have irritated the critic, this
is his revenge!"
Blanden was obliged to confess that this criticism of Spiegeler was a
collection of flowers of the most pointed epigrams, that it was
spiteful, and in its way annihilating.
"Even two years ago," continued Giulia, "I should more easily have
risen above this scorn; at that time I was sure of my voice and my
success, now it is different--"
"Two years ago! And was not then Signora Giulia secretly at my castle
during my absence?"
"I do not deny it! Curiosity prompted me to become acquainted with my
friend's home."
"And did you not enchant all the rooms of my castle with leaves of
recollection and golden sayings?"
"It was a pardonable wish to awaken the recollections of a mysterious
meeting by the traces which an equally mysterious visitor left behind."
"Not the charm of mystery brought us together at that time, it pressed
its seal upon our happy meeting."
"Not in recollections does happiness lie, but in oblivion; I know no
other now."
"You are melancholy, Signora! Shall you then retire from the stage?"
"Oh, you do not know," broke from Giulia, "with what heavy chains I am
bound to the galley! Others may remain constant to it from fear of
want. I should fall a victim to much greater misery. Behind the
stage-scenery of my life stands a spectre, a fearful spectre, ready to
step forth at any moment. If I renounce the glory of the stage, I fall
completely into that spectre's gruesome power."
"I should have the courage to hazard a conflict with that ghost."
"That conflict would not bring me redemption. Oh, how I long for rest!"
Giulia's features assumed an expression of most intense exhaustion; she
sank upon the sofa and hid her face in her hands.
Lieutenant Buschmann was announced.
"Count upon my help," said Blanden, "when and wheresoever you may need
it. This knightly duty I owe to the gracious lady of the magic lake,
and shall fulfil it as faithfully as ever knight served his lady."
Giulia rose, and, with a quiet smile, but a tear in her eye, held out
her hand to bid farewell.